The galleries: Billy's bite of a golden era

By T.J. McNAMARA

What is it worth? As the speculative market for investment in art continues to flourish, this is the question continually asked. Tales of Gold, an exhibition at Artspace (until July 18), incorporates a brilliant conceptual answer to the question. Furthermore, the show is an imaginative, curatorial triumph.

At the centre of the exhibition is a golden apple first conceived by artist/philosopher Billy Apple in 1983. Apples have a built-in mythical component: the apple in the Garden of Eden, the apple Paris awarded to Venus which led to the launching of a thousand ships and the burning of the tall towers of Troy, the distracting apples of Atlanta. Later there was music and computers.

All this myth is concentrated in the centre of the show, where the bright, reflective, perfectly moulded golden apple is placed in the middle of the bare gallery. As an object it is a marvellous thing. Its value is emphasised by an ever-present security guard.

This is a work that perpetually has an answer to that perennial question, "How valuable is a work of art?" This is a work of art because it is signed by an artist and it is shown in an art context. It has stamped on it the hallmark of its purity (.9999) and its exact weight in ounces. To know its worth, you simply consult the financial pages to see the world price of gold.

There is another dimension to this work of art because it has a history and this has expanded the piece to an installation. The history is symbolic and written on the ceiling. Wording chosen by the artist's collaborator, Wystan Curnow, is lettered on the light fittings. It tells of Ray Smith who commissioned the golden apple. It lists his possessions and his money at the height of his prosperity and, in a few words, speaks of how it was all swept away.

The apple and its chequered history become a potent symbol of drive for possessions and how life, particularly financial life, can have amazing highs and lows. Just like the reputations of artists.

As a context for this philosophical meditation on the worth of art, Artspace director Tobias Berger has persuaded 15 commercial galleries to contribute a work from their stock. Each work, with one witty exception, has an asking price of $35,000.

The show is called 35K. It is a surprisingly varied exhibition of contemporary art ranging through Pop Art to extreme abstraction with some fine painterly meditation on the relationship between Pakeha and Maori mixed in.

In a dexterous piece of curatorship, one of the pieces, a statue of a security guard, solemn in thick shoes and white shirt, looks out on the golden apple just as the real guard does. And this guard is even more real than the actual guard. Extraordinarily, no matter how you walk around the apple, the statue always is in the corner of your eye. It stands like an odd presiding deity and gives viewers even more to think about as they ponder art and value.

In Parnell Road, a picture that is part of a show of paintings of Parnell by George Baloghy at Artis Gallery (until July 9), you can see Fishers Fine Art building where an exhibition by Lisa Wisse has almost concluded. Both exhibitions are almost sold out which establishes at least one aspect of their worth.

Yet surely people see these works as much more than a monetary investment. They are also an investment in feeling and delight as well as decoration.

In Baloghy's paintings the emotional appeal is to the familiar since they all depict scenes around Parnell well known to Aucklanders.

The most ambitious is a painting of St Stephens Chapel. It is a picturesque subject but Baloghy's treatment is exact, honest and unsentimental. He includes the port and its cranes as accurately as the flowers that adorn the graves. He has splendid equivalents in paint for foliage, and in this painting comparisons with Stanley Spencer's paintings of Cookham are appropriate.

Most of the views are considerably less picturesque in themselves but are given a special quality by the intensity of Baloghy's style. Railway yards, decking, scaffolding and apartments receive the same attention as vistas of the harbour or the splendid shape of Mt Hobson.

The parameters of his work are tight but within them his paintings combine accuracy with strength.

In her equally popular show at Fishers, Wisse pushed much harder to wring emotional significance from the landscape. She favours water, headlands and cabbage trees, all in rich sepia tones with the addition of dry leaves and an explicatory text.

Titles such as Awaroa, Ageless Beauty and Mt Taranaki, Statuesque Treasure try to suggest the viewer's response. As well as New Zealand landscapes there were equally popular scenes from Tuscany and some conventional nudes.